Property assessments go high-tech

Wednesday

City officials are going high-tech to ensure property assessments are “fair and accurate.”

Instead of door-to-door property evaluations, the city is using aerial and street-level photographs as well as computer programs to assign property valuations.

The city is participating in a pilot program to update its property assessment records.

Depending on the success of the program, it could revolutionize the way communities across the state assess their properties.

What city officials have found so far — they have reviewed about 16,000 of the 48,000 properties in the city since last summer — is that a number of properties were under-assessed for many years because of human errors made in calculating the square footage, determining the condition or style of buildings, or transcribing hand-written information compiled by assessors into the assessor’s data base.

Also, some properties had not been inspected by a local assessor since as far back as 1985, even though the state Department of Revenue requires a field inspection of all properties every three years.

“We did a statistical review of properties in the city and we discovered that the data collection did not reflect the current status of certain properties,” City Assessor William J. Ford told the City Council Tuesday night. “There were variations in the conditions of properties, the quality of construction and style classifications.

“Even though the previous data collection did meet (state Department of Revenue) certification, we recognized the need to strengthen our organization, as part of a top-to-bottom review of the (assessing) division and identifying areas for improvements, efficiencies and use of technology,” he added. “We want to create a 21st century, extremely efficient division that meets and exceeds all regulations and ensures that all data collection is fair and accurate.”

To achieve that, the city received permission from the Department of Revenue last year to drop the antiquated and labor-intensive assessment process it had been using in favor of a desktop imaging program for its current revaluation of all property.

Rather than having assessors fan out across the city to view properties, determine their physical attributes and record that information on a card, all the work is being done on a desktop computer and software system, utilizing aerial and street-level photographs that have been taken of every property in the city.

Assessors now have the capability of viewing on a computer all four sides of a property, and the software with the program can determine the length, height and square footage of a building, eliminating the need for any kind of human calculations.

He said it will also enable assessors to get accurate measurements on the heights on buildings — data they were not able to collect before. He said that will be particularly important when it comes to assessing commercial buildings used for storage, such as warehouses, where values are based on their storage capacity.

“Everything that makes up a property we are able to look at and make a better determination of their value,” Mr. Ford said. “We are now in the process of correcting anything and everything that is different on each property.”

He added that assessors can also now review far more properties every day at a far lower cost. He added there is a significant cost associated with sending people out into the field to do the inspections.

“This will actually allow us to do many more properties — more than double the number of inspections done in a day — and it will significantly reduce our fuel costs,” he said.

Mr. Ford said his staff is on track to complete its review of all 48,000 properties by Aug. 15. He said all property owners will be sent notifications in October of their updated property information.

Last week, some residents complained about the city’s assessing practices, citing dramatic increases in new assessments for some residential properties. In some instances, the assessment increases were in the range of 15 percent and more.

Mr. Ford said those increases resulted from the current review of properties. He said changes have been made to more than 5,000 properties to more accurately reflect their conditions and square footage.

For instance, he said many Cape Cod-style homes that have two dormers in the front are considered 1-1/2 stories in height, according to Fannie Mae guidelines.

But he said many of those homes also have a full dormer across their entire back and as a result are classified as being 1-3/4 stories by Fannie Mae, thus increasing the amount of living space in the home which in turn increases its assessment.

Mr. Ford said 1,120 such homes, originally classified as being 1-1/2 stories, are now classified as being 1-3/4 stories.

“Nobody who has come to me has said the dormer does not exist,” Mr. Ford said. “They admit the dormer exists. For whatever the reason, these homes were not consistently or accurately recognized as being 1-3/4 stories and these inaccuracies then somehow got through the system.”

Mr. Ford said the city’s cost for the pilot program is roughly $200,000. In comparison, he said, it would have cost the city more than $700,000 had it farmed the work out to a private company and it would have cost about $984,000 if the city did the work in-house.

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